Forum

 
  Back to OzPolitic.com   Welcome, Guest. Please Login or Register
  Forum Home Album HelpSearch Recent Rules LoginRegister  
 

Pages: 1 2 3 4
Send Topic Print
How whites took over America (Read 10221 times)
...
Gold Member
*****
Offline



Posts: 23673
WA
Gender: male
How whites took over America
Apr 6th, 2012 at 11:15am
 
Damn racists...

Back to top
 

In the fullness of time...
 
IP Logged
 
Soren
Gold Member
*****
Offline



Posts: 25654
Gender: male
Re: How whites took over America
Reply #1 - Apr 7th, 2012 at 9:42am
 
Excellent parody. All indigenous people are anti-white racists.
Back to top
 
 
IP Logged
 
muso
Gold Member
*****
Offline



Posts: 13151
Gladstone, Queensland
Gender: male
Re: How whites took over America
Reply #2 - Apr 9th, 2012 at 9:44am
 
Google Mississippian culture and Cahokia (avoiding the UFO crap).  The North American natives had cities that rivaled those in  Europe. 

In its time, Cahokia supported a larger population than medieval London and maintained a trade network that extended the full course of the Mississippi River, from the Gulf of Mexico into the Great Lakes territories.   

The most influential factor in the demise of the North American natives was the disease carried by the first European settlers. They dropped like flies from illnesses that were common in Europe with its poor sanitation. 

Smallpox was the most significant disease. Others included measles, scarlet fever, typhoid, typhus, influenza, whooping cough, tuberculosis, cholera, diphtheria, chicken pox, and venereal diseases.
Back to top
 

...
1523 people like this. The remaining 7,134,765,234 do not 
 
IP Logged
 
Soren
Gold Member
*****
Offline



Posts: 25654
Gender: male
Re: How whites took over America
Reply #3 - Apr 9th, 2012 at 9:54am
 
muso wrote on Apr 9th, 2012 at 9:44am:
Google Mississippian culture and Cahokia (avoiding the UFO crap).  The North American natives had cities that rivaled those in  Europe. 

In its time, Cahokia supported a larger population than medieval London and maintained a trade network that extended the full course of the Mississippi River, from the Gulf of Mexico into the Great Lakes territories.   

The most influential factor in the demise of the North American natives was the disease carried by the first European settlers. They dropped like flies from illnesses that were common in Europe with its poor sanitation. 

Smallpox was the most significant disease. Others included measles, scarlet fever, typhoid, typhus, influenza, whooping cough, tuberculosis, cholera, diphtheria, chicken pox, and venereal diseases.



Cahokia began to decline after 1300 CE. It was abandoned more than a century before Europeans arrived in North America, in the early 16th century.

Back to top
 
 
IP Logged
 
muso
Gold Member
*****
Offline



Posts: 13151
Gladstone, Queensland
Gender: male
Re: How whites took over America
Reply #4 - Apr 9th, 2012 at 11:59am
 
Soren wrote on Apr 9th, 2012 at 9:54am:
muso wrote on Apr 9th, 2012 at 9:44am:
Google Mississippian culture and Cahokia (avoiding the UFO crap).  The North American natives had cities that rivaled those in  Europe. 

In its time, Cahokia supported a larger population than medieval London and maintained a trade network that extended the full course of the Mississippi River, from the Gulf of Mexico into the Great Lakes territories.   

The most influential factor in the demise of the North American natives was the disease carried by the first European settlers. They dropped like flies from illnesses that were common in Europe with its poor sanitation. 

Smallpox was the most significant disease. Others included measles, scarlet fever, typhoid, typhus, influenza, whooping cough, tuberculosis, cholera, diphtheria, chicken pox, and venereal diseases.



Cahokia began to decline after 1300 CE. It was abandoned more than a century before Europeans arrived in North America, in the early 16th century.



Before Hernando De Soto, there were accounts of explorers finding large cities of North American Indians. Most of the population decline took place in the early to mid 16th Century, coincident with the first of the conquistadors.

I'll find some better links,  but I recall discussing the decline of the Amerindians on another forum a few years ago and the narrative of an early explorer  describing the wooden walled cities and Pueblos.

Some historians go so far as to say European diseases reduced the pre-contact population of the New World by 90 percent or more. One says the population of central Mexico was reduced from 25 million in 1519 to 3 million by 1568 and only 750,000 by the early 1600s, 3 percent of the pre-conquest total.

I recall reading that the  total population North of Mexico was of the order of 10 million, which was comparable to that of Europe.
Back to top
« Last Edit: Apr 9th, 2012 at 12:22pm by muso »  

...
1523 people like this. The remaining 7,134,765,234 do not 
 
IP Logged
 
Soren
Gold Member
*****
Offline



Posts: 25654
Gender: male
Re: How whites took over America
Reply #5 - Apr 9th, 2012 at 4:27pm
 
muso wrote on Apr 9th, 2012 at 11:59am:
Soren wrote on Apr 9th, 2012 at 9:54am:
muso wrote on Apr 9th, 2012 at 9:44am:
Google Mississippian culture and Cahokia (avoiding the UFO crap).  The North American natives had cities that rivaled those in  Europe. 

In its time, Cahokia supported a larger population than medieval London and maintained a trade network that extended the full course of the Mississippi River, from the Gulf of Mexico into the Great Lakes territories.   

The most influential factor in the demise of the North American natives was the disease carried by the first European settlers. They dropped like flies from illnesses that were common in Europe with its poor sanitation. 

Smallpox was the most significant disease. Others included measles, scarlet fever, typhoid, typhus, influenza, whooping cough, tuberculosis, cholera, diphtheria, chicken pox, and venereal diseases.



Cahokia began to decline after 1300 CE. It was abandoned more than a century before Europeans arrived in North America, in the early 16th century.



Before Hernando De Soto, there were accounts of explorers finding large cities of North American Indians. Most of the population decline took place in the early to mid 16th Century, coincident with the first of the conquistadors.

I'll find some better links,  but I recall discussing the decline of the Amerindians on another forum a few years ago and the narrative of an early explorer  describing the wooden walled cities and Pueblos.

Some historians go so far as to say European diseases reduced the pre-contact population of the New World by 90 percent or more. One says the population of central Mexico was reduced from 25 million in 1519 to 3 million by 1568 and only 750,000 by the early 1600s, 3 percent of the pre-conquest total.

I recall reading that the  total population North of Mexico was of the order of 10 million, which was comparable to that of Europe.


Syphilis is a disease the Indians gave the Europeans.

Back to top
 
 
IP Logged
 
...
Gold Member
*****
Offline



Posts: 23673
WA
Gender: male
Re: How whites took over America
Reply #6 - Apr 9th, 2012 at 6:13pm
 
The creation and spread of disease is an unavoidable by-product of close living, as in cities. If there really were great cities in the new world, they would have given rise to diseases that Europeans settlers would have had no immunity to.  It would have been very hard for them to have got established if they had a mortality rate of even half the 90% claimed for the natives. 

Quote:
There are at least three sets of reasons to explain the findings that agriculture was bad for health. First, hunter-gatherers enjoyed a varied diet, while early fanners obtained most of their food from one or a few starchy crops. The farmers gained cheap calories at the cost of poor nutrition, (today just three high-carbohydrate plants -- wheat, rice, and corn -- provide the bulk of the calories consumed by the human species, yet each one is deficient in certain vitamins or amino acids essential to life.) Second, because of dependence on a limited number of crops, farmers ran the risk of starvation if one crop failed. Finally, the mere fact that agriculture encouraged people to clump together in crowded societies, many of which then carried on trade with other crowded societies, led to the spread of parasites and infectious disease. (Some archaeologists think it was the crowding, rather than agriculture, that promoted disease, but this is a chicken-and-egg argument, because crowding encourages agriculture and vice versa.) Epidemics couldn't take hold when populations were scattered in small bands that constantly shifted camp. Tuberculosis and diarrheal disease had to await the rise of farming, measles and bubonic plague the appearnce of large cities.


http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html
Back to top
« Last Edit: Apr 9th, 2012 at 6:25pm by ... »  

In the fullness of time...
 
IP Logged
 
muso
Gold Member
*****
Offline



Posts: 13151
Gladstone, Queensland
Gender: male
Re: How whites took over America
Reply #7 - Apr 10th, 2012 at 11:06am
 
Soren wrote on Apr 9th, 2012 at 4:27pm:
Syphilis is a disease the Indians gave the Europeans.



http://hnn.us/articles/7302.html
Quote:
The most lethal of the pathogens introduced by the Europeans was smallpox, which sometimes incapacitated so many adults at once that deaths from hunger and starvation ran as high as deaths from disease; in several cases, entire tribes were rendered extinct. Other killers included measles, influenza, whooping cough, diphtheria, typhus, bubonic plague, cholera, and scarlet fever. Although syphilis was apparently native to parts of the Western hemisphere, it, too, was probably introduced into North America by Europeans.


Quote:
A second, even less substantiated instance of alleged biological warfare concerns an incident that occurred on June 20, 1837. On that day, Churchill writes, the U.S. Army began to dispense"'trade blankets' to Mandans and other Indians gathered at Fort Clark on the Missouri River in present-day North Dakota." He continues: Far from being trade goods, the blankets had been taken from a military infirmary in St. Louis quarantined for smallpox, and brought upriver aboard the steamboat St. Peter’s. When the first Indians showed symptoms of the disease on July 14, the post surgeon advised those camped near the post to scatter and seek"sanctuary" in the villages of healthy relatives.
Back to top
 

...
1523 people like this. The remaining 7,134,765,234 do not 
 
IP Logged
 
muso
Gold Member
*****
Offline



Posts: 13151
Gladstone, Queensland
Gender: male
Re: How whites took over America
Reply #8 - Apr 10th, 2012 at 11:39am
 
... wrote on Apr 9th, 2012 at 6:13pm:
The creation and spread of disease is an unavoidable by-product of close living, as in cities. If there really were great cities in the new world, they would have given rise to diseases that Europeans settlers would have had no immunity to.  It would have been very hard for them to have got established if they had a mortality rate of even half the 90% claimed for the natives. 




You don't think the Aztecs lived in cities?

...

Tenochtitlan, the capital city was enormous, probably the biggest city in the World at the time, with a population of around 200,000. It's sister city of Tlatelolco had a population of 60,000.

It was probably their high standards of sanitation that prevented disease.

Quote:
Two double aqueducts, each more than 4 km (2.5 mi) long and made of terracotta, provided the city with fresh water from the springs at Chapultepec. This was intended mainly for cleaning and washing. For drinking, water from mountain springs was preferred. Most of the population liked to bathe twice a day; Moctezuma was said to take four baths a day. As soap they used the root of a plant called copalxocotl.


Quote:
When we saw so many cities and villages built in the water and other great towns on dry land we were amazed and said that it was like the enchantments  on account of the great towers and cues and buildings rising from the water, and all built of masonry. And some of our soldiers even asked whether the things that we saw were not a dream?  I do not know how to describe it, seeing things as we did that had never been heard of or seen before, not even dreamed about.


from Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The Conquest of New Spain
Back to top
« Last Edit: Apr 10th, 2012 at 11:57am by muso »  

...
1523 people like this. The remaining 7,134,765,234 do not 
 
IP Logged
 
...
Gold Member
*****
Offline



Posts: 23673
WA
Gender: male
Re: How whites took over America
Reply #9 - Apr 10th, 2012 at 11:53am
 
muso wrote on Apr 10th, 2012 at 11:39am:
... wrote on Apr 9th, 2012 at 6:13pm:
The creation and spread of disease is an unavoidable by-product of close living, as in cities. If there really were great cities in the new world, they would have given rise to diseases that Europeans settlers would have had no immunity to.  It would have been very hard for them to have got established if they had a mortality rate of even half the 90% claimed for the natives. 

Quote:
There are at least three sets of reasons to explain the findings that agriculture was bad for health. First, hunter-gatherers enjoyed a varied diet, while early fanners obtained most of their food from one or a few starchy crops. The farmers gained cheap calories at the cost of poor nutrition, (today just three high-carbohydrate plants -- wheat, rice, and corn -- provide the bulk of the calories consumed by the human species, yet each one is deficient in certain vitamins or amino acids essential to life.) Second, because of dependence on a limited number of crops, farmers ran the risk of starvation if one crop failed. Finally, the mere fact that agriculture encouraged people to clump together in crowded societies, many of which then carried on trade with other crowded societies, led to the spread of parasites and infectious disease. (Some archaeologists think it was the crowding, rather than agriculture, that promoted disease, but this is a chicken-and-egg argument, because crowding encourages agriculture and vice versa.) Epidemics couldn't take hold when populations were scattered in small bands that constantly shifted camp. Tuberculosis and diarrheal disease had to await the rise of farming, measles and bubonic plague the appearnce of large cities.


http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html



You don't think the Aztecs lived in cities?

http://abrahimappel.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/tenochtitlc3a1n-diego-rivera.jpg



Cities that rivalled those of Europe?  No I don't.  The lack of inter-population trade and large domesticable animals are pretty big barriers.

Quote:
The one-sided exchange of lethal germs between the Old and New worlds is among the most striking and consequence-laden facts of recent history. Whereas over a dozen major infectious diseases of Old World origins became established in the New World, not a single major killer reached Europe from the Americas. The sole possible exception is syphilis, whose area of origin still remains controversial.

That one-sidedness is more striking with the knowledge that large, dense human populations are a prerequisite for the evolution of crowd diseases. If recent reappraisals of the pre-Columbian New World population are correct, that population was not far below the contemporaneous population of Eurasia. Some New World cities, like Tenochtitlán, were among the world’s most populous cities at the time. Yet Tenochtitlán didn’t have awful germs waiting in store for the Spaniards. Why not?

One possible factor is that the rise of dense human populations began somewhat later in the New World than in the Old. Another is that the three most populous American centers--the Andes, Mexico, and the Mississippi Valley--were never connected by regular fast trade into one gigantic breeding ground for microbes, in the way that Europe, North Africa, India, and China became connected in late Roman times.

The main reason becomes clear, however, if we ask a simple question: From what microbes could any crowd diseases of the Americas have evolved? We’ve seen that Eurasian crowd diseases evolved from diseases of domesticated herd animals. Significantly, there were many such animals in Eurasia. But there were only five animals that became domesticated in the Americas: the turkey in Mexico and parts of North America, the guinea pig and llama/alpaca (probably derived from the same original wild species) in the Andes, the Muscovy duck in tropical South America, and the dog throughout the Americas.


http://discovermagazine.com/1992/oct/thearrowofdiseas137

Back to top
« Last Edit: Apr 10th, 2012 at 12:03pm by ... »  

In the fullness of time...
 
IP Logged
 
muso
Gold Member
*****
Offline



Posts: 13151
Gladstone, Queensland
Gender: male
Re: How whites took over America
Reply #10 - Apr 10th, 2012 at 12:02pm
 
... wrote on Apr 10th, 2012 at 11:53am:

Cities that rivalled those of Europe?  No I don't.


Quote:
The one-sided exchange of lethal germs between the Old and New worlds is among the most striking and consequence-laden facts of recent history. Whereas over a dozen major infectious diseases of Old World origins became established in the New World, not a single major killer reached Europe from the Americas. The sole possible exception is syphilis, whose area of origin still remains controversial.

That one-sidedness is more striking with the knowledge that large, dense human populations are a prerequisite for the evolution of crowd diseases. If recent reappraisals of the pre-Columbian New World population are correct, that population was not far below the contemporaneous population of Eurasia. Some New World cities, like Tenochtitlán, were among the world’s most populous cities at the time. Yet Tenochtitlán didn’t have awful germs waiting in store for the Spaniards. Why not?

One possible factor is that the rise of dense human populations began somewhat later in the New World than in the Old. Another is that the three most populous American centers--the Andes, Mexico, and the Mississippi Valley--were never connected by regular fast trade into one gigantic breeding ground for microbes, in the way that Europe, North Africa, India, and China became connected in late Roman times.

The main reason becomes clear, however, if we ask a simple question: From what microbes could any crowd diseases of the Americas have evolved? We’ve seen that Eurasian crowd diseases evolved from diseases of domesticated herd animals. Significantly, there were many such animals in Eurasia. But there were only five animals that became domesticated in the Americas: the turkey in Mexico and parts of North America, the guinea pig and llama/alpaca (probably derived from the same original wild species) in the Andes, the Muscovy duck in tropical South America, and the dog throughout the Americas.


http://discovermagazine.com/1992/oct/thearrowofdiseas137



I edited Reply 8 and added some comments on sanitation. Washing twice a day is an improvement on the contemporary European habit of washing twice a year. Maybe that had something to do with their lack of disease.
Back to top
« Last Edit: Apr 10th, 2012 at 12:08pm by muso »  

...
1523 people like this. The remaining 7,134,765,234 do not 
 
IP Logged
 
...
Gold Member
*****
Offline



Posts: 23673
WA
Gender: male
Re: How whites took over America
Reply #11 - Apr 10th, 2012 at 12:05pm
 
muso wrote on Apr 10th, 2012 at 12:02pm:
... wrote on Apr 10th, 2012 at 11:53am:

Cities that rivalled those of Europe?  No I don't.


Quote:
The one-sided exchange of lethal germs between the Old and New worlds is among the most striking and consequence-laden facts of recent history. Whereas over a dozen major infectious diseases of Old World origins became established in the New World, not a single major killer reached Europe from the Americas. The sole possible exception is syphilis, whose area of origin still remains controversial.

That one-sidedness is more striking with the knowledge that large, dense human populations are a prerequisite for the evolution of crowd diseases. If recent reappraisals of the pre-Columbian New World population are correct, that population was not far below the contemporaneous population of Eurasia. Some New World cities, like Tenochtitlán, were among the world’s most populous cities at the time. Yet Tenochtitlán didn’t have awful germs waiting in store for the Spaniards. Why not?

One possible factor is that the rise of dense human populations began somewhat later in the New World than in the Old. Another is that the three most populous American centers--the Andes, Mexico, and the Mississippi Valley--were never connected by regular fast trade into one gigantic breeding ground for microbes, in the way that Europe, North Africa, India, and China became connected in late Roman times.

The main reason becomes clear, however, if we ask a simple question: From what microbes could any crowd diseases of the Americas have evolved? We’ve seen that Eurasian crowd diseases evolved from diseases of domesticated herd animals. Significantly, there were many such animals in Eurasia. But there were only five animals that became domesticated in the Americas: the turkey in Mexico and parts of North America, the guinea pig and llama/alpaca (probably derived from the same original wild species) in the Andes, the Muscovy duck in tropical South America, and the dog throughout the Americas.


http://discovermagazine.com/1992/oct/thearrowofdiseas137





Yep, thanks for repeating what I posted.
Is there more to a cities "greatness' than number of inhabitants?  I don't see Mumbai or Karachi topping the worlds best cities lists...
Back to top
 

In the fullness of time...
 
IP Logged
 
muso
Gold Member
*****
Offline



Posts: 13151
Gladstone, Queensland
Gender: male
Re: How whites took over America
Reply #12 - Apr 10th, 2012 at 12:11pm
 
Once again:

(I have a bad habit of editing my post over a period of 30 minutes while doing other things)

Quote:
When we saw so many cities and villages built in the water and other great towns on dry land we were amazed and said that it was like the enchantments  on account of the great towers and cues and buildings rising from the water, and all built of masonry. And some of our soldiers even asked whether the things that we saw were not a dream?  I do not know how to describe it, seeing things as we did that had never been heard of or seen before, not even dreamed about.


Quote:
Two double aqueducts, each more than 4 km (2.5 mi) long and made of terracotta, provided the city with fresh water from the springs at Chapultepec. This was intended mainly for cleaning and washing. For drinking, water from mountain springs was preferred. Most of the population liked to bathe twice a day; Moctezuma was said to take four baths a day. As soap they used the root of a plant called copalxocotl.
Back to top
 

...
1523 people like this. The remaining 7,134,765,234 do not 
 
IP Logged
 
...
Gold Member
*****
Offline



Posts: 23673
WA
Gender: male
Re: How whites took over America
Reply #13 - Apr 10th, 2012 at 12:21pm
 
I also tend to edit several times, I'm really just thinking out loud on this one.
I was thinking about aqueducts and making sure you don't poo where you eat/drink, but I guess personal bathing could be a factor, but not that large a one. It's also incorrect to claim commonality between Indian populations - the lack of tarde between them suggests they had little contact. When you consider that abos were also decimated by disease and bathing isn't something you could attribute to them, it does seem more likely that a common theme - the lack of domesticable animals for human diseases to evolve from is probably the best reason why disease didn't push back against europeans.  Whitey wins because our animals are awesome. 

Back to top
 

In the fullness of time...
 
IP Logged
 
bobbythefap1
Gold Member
*****
Offline



Posts: 7026
Listen now to the rain
Re: How whites took over America
Reply #14 - Apr 10th, 2012 at 12:23pm
 
... wrote on Apr 10th, 2012 at 12:21pm:
I was thinking about aqueducts and making sure you don't poo where you eat/drink, but I guess personal bathing could be a factor, but not that large a one. When you consider that abos were also decimated by disease and bathing isn't something you could attribute to them, it does seem more likely that a common theme - the lack of domesticable animals for human diseases to evolve from is probably the best reason why disease didn't push back against europeans.  Whitey wins because our animals are awesome. 

I guess you don’t know much about the recent history of England, specifically London.

Abos were decimated by disease because whites brought new disease that their immune system was not adapted too.
Back to top
 

A day without sunshine is like night.
 
IP Logged
 
Pages: 1 2 3 4
Send Topic Print